Stories

Whether you're using Ruby, Java, PHP, .net, Cobol or PDP-8 assembly, NewRelic is the monitoring tool you should be using. There's no excuses - the account is free, the code is free, setup takes less time than you'll spend ordering your extra-hot half-caf 3-pump quad grande white mocha ristretto pull this morning. Do it now.

High Voltage 1.2 is out, and you should upgrade immediately! Prior versions have a vulnerability that will let an attacker execute any arbitrary .erb file as if its a file on your server. <% sudo rm -rf / %> anyone?

Five newbie mistakes people make - 1) not properly placing stickers on their laptop. 2) not checking rubydramas.com frequently enough to find out the latest scandal. 3) not picking a side in the VI vs. EMACS debate. 4) thinking ruby brigades are organizations for militant jewelers 5) Complaining when their Ruby5 episode is 6 minutes long. Thats an extra minute for free, people!

Baselines aren't just for Huey Lewis anymore... The typography concept of a baseline is one of the things that makes print design gorgeous, and your average web site look like a flyer for a bake sale. baseline.js is a javascript library that subtly resizes your images so they don't throw off the baseline of the surrounding text (resizing, on average, half of the font size of its parent element). Its not a 100% solution, but it does solve one of the hard problems in maintaining the baseline.

Ever notice how the gems we reuse seem to be free of 'baggage' from the projects they might have originally been extracted from? This decoupling is one of the holy grails of software architecture and we rarely achieve it in projects where all the code lives together. In this article, Vincent Driessen talks about maintaining an attitude of 'open source development' to improve software architecture, even if you don't plan on actually open sourcing the end result.

Track your website's speed over time with HARs, upgrade your Capybaras, new and improved resque, cleaning up your old files with maid, a tour of Basecamp Next with DHH, and learn how to author JRuby gems all on this episode of Ruby5.